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Raleigh-ing

Last post I mentioned we flew in to Raleigh on Halloween day. Our visit there was really a scouting trip – would we like it enough to pack up and leave Miami? We’ve both grown up in the Sunshine State, and the love-hate relationship that natives have with Miami, Florida is like nothing else.

You'd have to be crazy to want to leave this behind, right?

Yet here we were. We had a checklist, and Raleigh, with it’s surrounding areas of Wake Forest, Durham, Apex, and Fuquay-Varina, seemed to fit.

List of Ever-Important Things

We must be able to get a fair amount of land – about an acre, for our budget. Our son and three dogs have never known what it’s like to have a yard, and that makes us sad.

The public school system must be a good one.

There should be a decent sense of community. As children of the 80’s – we grew up on 80’s movies and the idolization of the bike-riding children of Astoria (Google it if you don’t get this reference). I want to bake a pie for the county fair. I want to belong to something. I want somewhere to go on the 4th of July. Sure, Miami has plenty of this – but the central focus here is partying. We want to be a family now.

It shouldn’t be so busy as to alienate my husband, nor so rural as to alienate me. A suburban middle ground.

We arrived on Halloween day and the climate, well, that was an easy sell for two Floridians. Our son looked outside the door of the rental car and softly cooed “wow” and “yay” at all of the red leaves. He stayed silent the entire time we drove, the whole time we were there – just staring out the window. This is not typical for our rambunctious little spitfire.

The air felt cleaner, and we felt generally happier. Maybe some of that was the vacation effect, but we felt like we were home by the third day, and it was sad to be back in Miami.

When we came home, we called a realtor. It was time. Our most trusted advisor reviewed the documents for completion.

The realtor gave us one piece of advice: “Have Less Crap”.

So on that note, it was time to begin downsizing. The target date for putting the house on the market was mid-November. The target date to move to Raleigh was February. We were doing this. We were about to close the book on our life in Miami, and open a new chapter in North Carolina. It was time to take some stuff to Goodwill.